https://socialistaction.org/2019/03/31/ilhan-omar-anti-zionist-comments-smeared-as-anti-semitic/
Ilhan Omar: Anti-Zionist comments smeared as anti-Semitic
/ 15 hours ago
April 2019 Omar (Brian Snyder:Reuters)
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
By JEFF MACKLER and BRUCE LESNICK
In a new campaign reminiscent of the McCarthy era witch-hunt,
politicians and media pundits have taken to smearing pro-Palestinian,
pro-BDS activists as anti-Semitic. Singled out for special attention are
those, like Somali-born Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and
Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who happen to be
people of color.
A typical incident began when journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted: “GOP
Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and
@RashidaTlaib over their criticisms of Israel. It’s stunning how much
time U.S. political leaders spend defending a foreign nation [Israel]
even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.”
Omar reposted Greenwald’s tweet and commented, “It’s all about the
Benjamins baby.”
“Benjamins” is taken from a 1996 rap song and a 2002 movie and is slang
for $100 bills that are faced with the image of American independence
leader Benjamin Franklin. Someone named Batya Ungar-Sargon then tweeted,
“Would love to know who @IlhanMN thinks is paying American politicians
to be pro-Israel, though I think I can guess. Bad form, Congresswoman.
That’s the second anti-Semitic trope you’ve tweeted.”
Omar replied, “AIPAC!” AIPAC refers to the American Israel Political
Action Committee, a lobbying group that, according to the Wall Street
Journal, spends $100 million per year lobbying U.S. politicians to
support U.S. policy in the Middle East. Immediately, defenders of Israel
and Zionism piled on to charge Omar with anti-Semitism. Nothing Omar
said was untrue, and her remarks were clearly aimed at Israeli policy
and its promoters, not Jews.
The false and furious accusations against Omar paralleled the ongoing
campaign by the British media and corporate politicians to smear Jeremy
Corbyn and the British Labor Party as anti-Semitic because of Corbyn’s
vocal support for Palestinian rights. Socialist Action rejects any and
all notions that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.
While anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry must be unequivocally
opposed, we recognize this reactionary witch-hunt equation for the
dangerous diversion that it is. Indeed, false charges of anti-Semitism
undermine the real fight against racism and bigotry.
Zionist efforts to demonize college professors and leading human rights
activists and scholars as anti-Semites, most recently Angela Davis and
Alice Walker, as well as Omar and Tlaib, have generally backfired. But
that did not happen without the Zionists having had some success in
pressuring university administrations to fire anti-Zionist professors,
expel protesting students and even implement campus rules restricting
what groups like Students for Justice in Palestine can advocate without
being subject to dismemberment, discipline, or expulsion.
Pressured to have the U.S. Congress condemn Ilhan Omar’s remarks, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi was compelled to back off and, instead, submit an
omnibus resolution that condemned racism, sexism, Islamophobia,
anti-Semitism, and other manifestations of hate and discrimination,
without mentioning Omar. This, in itself, was a potent and inadvertent
recognition that condemning Omar, a Muslim woman who spoke the truth,
while ignoring the society’s more generalized racist, sexist, and
homophobic prejudices, was no longer acceptable in U.S. socioety. A
condemnation of Omar, in the eyes of factional Democrats, might also be
seen as supporting President Trump’s overt Islamophobia.
The slandered Omar is no anti-Semite. Neither is she a revolutionary,
but rather a bright capitalist politician and reformist spokeswoman for
the oppressed and persecuted Minneapolis Somali Community. Her recent
statements supporting a “two-state solution” in Israel/Palestine and her
weak, if not reactionary, statements on Venezuela and Syria, inform us
that, as with Ocasio-Cortez, or any other Democrats, she has no
intention of fundamentally challenging the Democratic Party’s
imperialist views.
Ocasio-Cortez, for example, was undoubtedly pressured immediately
following her Democratic Party primary victory to take down from her
website criticism of the Zionist state, a prerequisite for her playing
politics in the pro-Zionist Democratic Party, the former party of the
Southern slaveocracy, many of whose offspring continue to operate, in
more civilized fashion, of course, as “Blue Dogs” or “social
conservatives”—that is, modern-day racist Democrats.
U.S. imperialism’s relations with Zionist Israel
The assumption that any lobbyist group or individual, AIPAC included,
determines U.S. policy in any matter is fundamentally flawed. However,
AIPAC and similar groups do act as self-appointed enforcers for U.S.
capitalist policy, ensuring that “freely elected” representatives toe
the imperial line.
Since its formation in 1948, when historic Palestine was forcefully
partitioned and half granted to the small minority Jewish population,
backed and armed by the departing British “mandate” imperialists at the
expense of the vast majority of the Palestinian people, U.S. imperialism
has viewed Israel as its central weapon in the Middle East to advance
its interests against the people of that region. That the Israel
military is funded by the U.S. government at $2-3 billion annually, the
largest amount of foreign aid granted to any country, has everything to
do with its role as the U.S. imperial surrogate in the region and
nothing to do with AIPAC or any other lobbying group.
More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland or
murdered, their property confiscated, and their rights denied in the
process of Israel’s colonial establishment. The U.S. government
supported that policy then and has continued to do so with regard to
every successive and monstrous assault on the Palestinian masses to this
date.
Revolutionary socialists in our tradition have always refused to lend
any legitimacy to the 1948 partition and colonization of Palestine, in
the same manner that we refused any legitimacy to the imperial
colonization of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In those cases, the
world’s superpowers divided up whole continents and decreed that their
conquests were part of the imperial “mother country”—declaring that the
peoples and resources of the colonized were the property of their
slave-master overseers.
Today in the U.S., Zionist-led groups, from AIPAC to the Anti-defamation
League of the B’nai B’rith, focus their attention on degrading and
attacking every effort to condemn Israel’s persecution of the
Palestinian masses and efforts to support BDS (Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions) against Israel. Recent B’nai B’rith statements, in mid-March
2019, condemn the Brown University student body for voting for
university divestment in Israel. They condemn the UN Human Rights
Commission that they claim “consistently singles out Israel for passing
endless resolutions that solely and falsely allege Israel misdeeds.”
On March 22, the B’nai Brith “welcomed President Donald Trump’s
announcement recognizing Israel’s control over the Israeli conquered and
occupied Golan Heights [in Syria] which reflects the longtime strategic
reality in the region.” Of course, “strategic reality” means nothing
less than Israel’s role as U.S. imperialism’s colonial enforcer.
AIPAC and B’nai B’rith today focus on promoting the lie that opposition
to the racist Zionist state is synonymous with anti-Semitism. They do so
in the context of a rising (if not majority) recognition in the U.S.
that the Palestinian people are oppressed, discriminated against and
murdered, as in Gaza, by Israel. In fact, March 30 marked the first
anniversary of the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians at the Gaza border
who peacefully mobilized in the thousands to demand their land and the
right to return to it.
Growing support for the Palestinian cause is reflected in the passage of
ongoing university student BDS efforts, in the major faith-based
organizations that adopted BDS resolutions and even in the actions of
some U.S. corporations that followed suit. Strikingly, today, perhaps a
majority of the American people reject a “two-state” solution wherein
the envisioned Palestinian state, at best, is envisioned as akin to a
tiny isolated non-viable Bantustan under near total Israeli control. In
truth, even this colonial conception is inimical to today’s Zionist
racist Israeli leaders whose “final solution” is the total extrication
of all Palestinians from their ancestral Palestinian homeland.
The growing popularity of our historic advocacy of a democratic secular
Palestine with the right of expelled Palestinians and their families to
return is increasing seen as the only realistic “solution.” This, of
course, implies the illegitimacy of the present Zionist state, a view
long championed by Socialist Action. It envisions a new Palestine where
Palestinians, Jews, Christians, and all nationalities can live together
in peace in the context of a democratic society.
Our view is that the true liberation and freedom of the oppressed,
artificially divided, and still imperialist-dominated Middle Eastern
region can best be accomplished in the context of a fight for a United
Socialist States of the Middle East, as opposed to the present Gulf
State monarchy-dominated, subservient mini-states and tiny enclaves
previously carved up and established by the European conquerors.
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March 31, 2019 in Civil Liberties, Democratic Party, Palestine.
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Carl Sagan
“ The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be
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